Comment by thelastgallon
1 month ago
Businesses run anywhere real money can be made. Middle east is the most volatile place. Yet, the businesses are perfectly okay building infrastructure to extract, refine and ship oil from there.
If real money can be made, there is no need of datacenters in space. Offer some country some money and they'll let you build whatever you want. The whole idea is entirely unprofitable thats why they are making up things that won't work economically. Keep giving us money indefinitely, we'll keep spending, money can be made after a few decades of spending ... trust us.
Note that you didn't mention any such country, and for good reason - there is none.
You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
> Note that you didn't mention any such country, and for good reason - there is none.
All flavors of Govt (authoritarian/democratic) are bending over backwards to build new DCs.
In Ulanqab, China buildout of data centers 1000x size of Colossus: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2099319829589295197
India, a country which has neither power nor water or any measurable infrastructure is giving massive subsidies to hyperscalers to build AI DCs. They get free land (very very costly), nearly free energy, guaranteed supply of water and so on ...
Examples of one authoritarian govt and one democratic govt. And there are 180+ other countries.
just to add a few more reasons not mentioned on X why they chose this place:
Cooling is a major factor. Ulanqab's average temperature is about 4.3°C, enabling free air cooling nearly 10 months a year and very low PUE around 1.1.
Even more decisive is cheap, abundant power—largely wind and solar plus coal—at roughly half the price of eastern China. Add vast open land, dedicated low-latency fiber to Beijing (~2-5 ms),
6 replies →
> one democratic govt
Honestly, India might be more democratic than China, but the current govt is known for it's authoritarian bent [1] and crony capitalism [2] in particular.
While governments of all types rushed to embrace AI data centers, perhaps driven by fears of being left out, the pushback against data centers seems to be universal. The difference is, countries with less authoritarian govenrments are seeing those pushbacks be generally more successful.
[1] The Chief Election Commissioner was recently caught manipulating voter rolls over the written objections of the other two election commissioners. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgw68yjg29o
[2] The transport minister came under flak after pushing a rushed transition to higher ethanol fuel blends. It transpired that his sons just happened to have set up ethanol factories just before the policy was announced and their net worth went up by 5000%. https://www.bhaskarenglish.in/originals/news/whye20-fuel-put...
> You'd need a dictatorship where people's voices don't matter, but then there's no right of ownership either.
And there are plenty of those countries. As well as countries that aren't dictatorships. Every leader everywhere is available for sale. In democracies, usually for a small sum. Dictatorships ask for a percentage of profit.
Everyone knows how the current administration got to power: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-e...
Trump will gladly allow datacenters to be built on federal lands. Just like he allows Oil/Coal and bans Wind and Solar. The only reason there is new story of Space Datacenters is because even if they are given everything by the Govt, it simply won't work.
If you see a datacenter in orbit, it means something went wrong on Earth: https://systemsthinkingcollection.substack.com/p/space-datac...
People believe all kinds of fiction and garbage, like going to Mars. (Why Terraform Mars When We Can Fix The Earth? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8mhib97--n4)
The same argument holds for AI DCs. If you can build profitable AI datacenters in space, why can't you build profitable AI datacenters on Earth? The only reason is you can't build profitable AI datacenters on earth. Just give us a few more trillions and wait a decade or two, we promise ...
This idea that space is a way to get out of the reach of NIMBYs is so dumb.
a: now you’re in everyone’s back yard, since satellites in orbit can be seen by the naked eye at twilight zipping across the sky, so now the whole earth hates you
b: you are still launching from earth, which is a pretty significant target if you’re worried about ecoterrorism.
24 replies →
Your idea is that because AI or data centers are supposedly 'entirely unprofitable', they want to expend even more capital to do it in space with less profit?
And somehow most of the replies seem to be about terrorism. What a comment section.
I'd expect the discussion to be a bit more focused on the scalability and solar power..
I think you are dramatically underestimating the terrorism concern. From public news reports we know almost 400 Flock cameras have been destroyed in acts of widespread grassroots criminal vandalism, and I am sure Flock knows the much higher true number. Likewise for Waymo, we know of at least half a dozen vehicles destroyed and at least two dozen temporarily disabled, and I am similarly sure Waymo knows the much higher true number. From the point of view of a data center executive who has chatted to a Flock or Waymo executive at a social event in the last few years, the risk of vandalism/terrorism is neither hypothetical nor plausible, but literally real and already happening.
I think you are dramatically overestimating it.
It's one thing to vandalize some cameras or a driverless car in your neighborhood.
Traveling to a large, potentially secured facility to commit terrorism is on another level.
It being inside a building it is also much more difficult to damage and the consequences would be far greater.
I'd think one would need strong motivations for such actions.
A protest seems much more realistic, but I did not even hear of protests at data centers yet, only a small one at OpenAI headquarters.
and "thermal radiation"
"But what about cooling?" is a tell-tale sign of people not knowing much about space systems and acting as experts.
Cooling in space is a solved problem for these designs, by construction. They start with existing, flight-proven systems that handle some N KW of heat rejection in space, and shape they payload to require less than N KW of heat, meaning they can technically use existing design as platform and swap out the payload (there is devil in the details around integration here).
That's why there's little weight in papers about this, and they instead focus on actually novel challenges (like operating ML hardware in high-radiation environments).
But yes, I too expected the discussion to be more substantial. As it is, we have a rehash from discussion on that "ML in space" paper from ~6 months ago, which solved thermals by construction and explained how this makes economic sense, and people 100% ignored that, and all comments were a mix of "it makes no economic sense" and "have they thought about how to cool it?".
*sigh*
2 replies →
The real point is power limitations, putting stuff in space in the right orbit lets you turn solar power into reliable base load.
The disadvantage is that your power generation infrastructure needs replacing at the same time as your chips (at least under current designs) which negates any advantage of needing fewer solar panels at any one point in time and less energy storage.
Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.
Why stop somewhere in between? You can go straight to the Sun and directly tap into near infinite source of energy. No need of solar panels, direct access to thermonuclear energy, too cheap to meter. The economics already works out, zero capex, zero opex for the next ~4 billion years. Just needs a few small problems to be worked out, like a pipe to transfer energy.
I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.
6 replies →
The problem with space is that you need to radiate all that waste heat.
Easy enough to do with a long tall stalactite shaped satelite.
Getting it up there and unfolding is an engineering problem, but if you have about 5 times the height as the width of your solar facing front it’s just a matter of moving heat around internally
2 replies →